I keep going, because I know I only have seconds to get him to listen. “When you did that, you taught me how to endure,” I say softly. “I’m asking you to do the same. I’m asking you to be stronger than your curse.”
This time, when he looks at me, I know he’s made his decision. “Then I need you to make me a promise before we do anything else. Before I take you to Sorcha.”
I swallow. “All right.”
“If I go with you and I become someone you don’t recognize, don’t let me hurt you. Leave me behind if you have to.” When I hesitate, he says it again. “Promise me.”
Then I do something I’ve never done in all the time I’ve known Kiaran: I lie to his face. “I promise.”
CHAPTER 20
I’VE BARELY walked through the door where Kiaran is keeping Sorcha before I have the urge to run in the other direction. Now I understand what Kiaran meant when he said Sorcha was exactly where she belongs. Why he said she was paying for the things she’s done.
Since my time in the Sìth-bhrùth I’ve become well acquainted with the fae’s creative methods of imprisonment. They employ power against their victims. Everything they do is intended to break you down little by little each day, each hour, each second. They make you decide which is easiest: death or handing over your soul.
“What the hell is this?” I breathe to myself.
Sorcha’s prison is a crossroads at night. She’s chained between two trees, one on either side of the road, and the shackles are so tight that her body is splayed and mostly immobile. The trees bend toward her, as if caging her in. The combined scents almost make me gag. Iron. Flesh. Something burning.
She looks so broken.
Along Sorcha’s arms and legs are long, jagged cuts that drip down her pale skin and onto the ground—where a pool of blood gathers so deep in a pockmark that it covers her to her ankles.
I should be satisfied to see Sorcha suffer—the way she made my mother suffer when she tore out her heart and left her to die in the street. I might have been, once, in the months after my mother’s death when I cared for nothing except vengeance. That Aileana wouldn’t have given a damn about compassion. Not for Sorcha.
But now . . .
Maybe it was the daysweeksmonthsyears Lonnrach had me. Helpless. When he kept me in the mirrored room, he tortured me like this, with control and isolation. A punishment to fit my crimes. I had spent a year hunting the fae, and in my time with him, I was no longer the hunter. I was the prey. He made certain I never forgot that.
Lonnrach’s words echo in my mind, a terrible reminder of my own worst days. Now you know precisely how it feels to be that helpless.
No one deserves to be under someone else’s complete control, unable to fight back even if they wanted.
Maybe I’ve grown too soft. Maybe I’m just tired of death. Maybe it’s compassion that separates us from monsters. Does that make me better than them or does it make me a fool?
“Kam?” Kiaran’s touch is light on my arm, but I pull away. As if he reads my thoughts, his gaze darkens. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Do you come in here just to . . .” make her bleed? Like Lonnrach did when he visited me?
Some punishments are so terrible that they are beyond justification. But the fae operate under a moral code that gives little thought to empathy. Especially when that faery is the Unseelie King.
“I have many faults,” Kiaran says in a hard voice, “but I don’t torture for amusement.”
“You did once.”
Like you loved it. Like you lived for it. Because you believed emotion was a weakness.
His expression shutters. “If I ever reach that point again”—a flicker of a glance at me—“that’s when you’ll know I’m gone.” He gestures to Sorcha with a nod. “These are her memories. Her torture is self-inflicted.”
“Her memories?”
“This is what she did to people when she lured them to crossroads at night.” Kiaran leans against the doorframe, his features shadowed in the moonlight. “The chains are dipped in water infused with seilgflùr so her powers are bound. The power here forces her to endure the deaths of those she’s killed. It’s considered a fair punishment.”
A breeze picks up, gently rustling the trees that line the road, and the faint scent of blood reaches me. Sorcha’s chains clink softly together, an eerie sound.
She still hasn’t looked up.
I don’t realize I’ve stepped back until I bump into Kiaran. “You think me cruel.” When I don’t respond, he says, “This is what she did for thousands of years to your kind. Every night. She doesn’t deserve any pity.”
“What about what you did?” I can’t help but ask. He may wear the penance of his kills on his skin, but it’s nothing like that. “What was your punishment?”
He’s unreadable, frustratingly so. I hate when I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
Kiaran drops his hand from my arm. “I gave my heart to a human.” He walks away before I can respond.
After a moment’s hesitation, I follow.
Sorcha never even looks up as we approach. Her dark hair shines in the moonlight, hanging down to her hips. It hides her face like a shroud. She wears a thin black dress that covers her from wrists to ankles, like something a woman would wear to a funeral. She looks so small like this; her shoulders are hunched forward, hands hanging weightlessly. The chains are the only thing holding her upright.
It’s such a macabre sight that another jolt of pity goes through me. That only grows as we draw closer and her short, wheezing breaths fill my ears. I shudder when I hear them.
I hate that sound.
They’re the quick, panting exhalations of an animal in so much agony that it’s all they can think about. If I’d heard that during a hunt, I would have killed the creature quickly. It would have been the right thing to do. It would have been a mercy.
I know that pain firsthand. I breathed like that after Lonnrach’s interrogations.
We stop in front of her, and beneath the cascade of her hair, I see Sorcha’s bloody lips curve into a smile. One that doesn’t fool me.
“Have you come to gloat, Kadamach?” Her voice is rough, like she’s been screaming. “Or are you simply here to watch and enjoy my punishment? I don’t know why you ever gave up your crown. Unseelie suits you.”
“Do you think I enjoy this?” Kiaran sounds tired. “I never wanted to be your King.”
“You did once.” Sorcha’s laugh is more of a choke. “You were willing to kill for it. The old you would have looked at all this blood and told me it was a waste. That I should have bled them all dry.”
A sudden image bursts across my mind. Sorcha at my mother’s neck, teeth buried in her skin. Her pulling away, lips covered in my mother’s blood. It marked her pale skin as starkly as oil on porcelain.
I can’t hold back the sound that escapes my throat.
Sorcha jerks her face up, and her eyes narrow at me through the veil of her deep black hair. Then she throws back her head and laughs, a throaty scratch of a noise that echoes in the night, half-crazed.